Monday, July 2, 2012

Patrick Larkinis a bestselling author specializing in historical, military, and espionage thrillers. His collaborations with Larry Bond—including Red Phoenix, Vortex, Cauldron, The Enemy Within, and Day of Wrath—have won critical acclaim for their suspense, realism, and unblinking appreciation of geopolitical and modern military realities. He spent several years in Washington, D.C. as a researcher for a committee of the House of Representatives, and then became a political and corporate speech writer. He's co-written multiple novels with Robert Ludlum and Larry Bond, as well as wrote adventures for a Star Trek role-playing game and created the background history for Battletech- which has spawned a whole series of popular board games, computer games and novels.

Thanks so much for joining us today, Pat!

Tell us a
bit about your latest novel and its characters.

THE STANDARD-BEARER is the first of a number of planned sequels to my Roman-era historical
mystery/thriller, THE TRIBUNE. And like THE TRIBUNE, it’s told as a
first-person narrative by my protagonist, the young, determined, honorable, and
sometimes reckless Roman soldier, Lucius Aurelius Valens. Many of the
characters I introduced in the first book appear again. Among them are: Aedan, Valens’s
lighthearted Celtic comrade-in-arms. His older, wiser, and more cautious
personal physician, Aristides. And Marah of Magdala, a beautiful, troubled, and
wealthy widow with whom he had a tempestuous and illicit affair, an affair
condemned by Roman law, by her family, and by her faith.

When book opens in the summer of A.D. 20, Valens and
his men intercept a caravan from the East smuggling arms and armor into the
province, and he’s ordered to track down and destroy those plotting rebellion
against Roman rule. What might seem a simple and straightforward task quickly
becomes a nightmare as Valens and his companions are drawn deeper into a maze
of treachery, deceit, and murder. If I do my job right, THE STANDARD-BEARER
will take readers on a wild, breakneck ride from the barren hills beyond the
Jordan, through Jerusalem’s twisting, crowded, and dangerous streets, and
finally deep into the desolate wilderness around the Dead Sea.

What inspired
you to write this story?

When I started writing THE TRIBUNE, I thought of it as a
stand-alone historical thriller. But by the time I finished the last scene, I
realized that the story was much larger and more intricate than
I’d first imagined. And that meant I had more mysteries for Valens and his
companions to solve, more conspiracies to unravel, and more deadly battles to
fight. There won’t be any cliff-hangers in the series—no books that leave the
reader waiting for the next novel to find out what happened. But each new book
will reveal another piece of the bigger, underlying story.

Who is your
favorite character and why?

The cheap answer would be: Whichever one I’m
writing now…because if I didn’t find them interesting—even the villains—I’m too
naturally lazy to do the hard work involved in pulling them out of my mind and
onto the page. [Grin.]

Probably, though, my longest-running favorite would be
Lucius Aurelius Valens. I’d never written in the first-person before THE
TRIBUNE and being forced to tell a whole story in one voice meant I had to dig
deeply into his personality. From a purely practical perspective, he’s also a
great character for a thriller. Valens is a man out-of-sync with his times. In
an age when Imperial Rome is ruled by aging cynics like Tiberius Caesar and Sejanus,
the cruel, conniving Praetorian Prefect, any man who genuinely tries to live up
to the old Republican virtues of honor, honesty, and courage is just asking for
trouble! Like most writers, I tend
to be a thinker and an observer…not a doer. So it’s a lot of fun to dive into
the mind of a character whose first impulse is to act, sometimes unwisely, if always
with the best of intentions, and who usually puts himself in mortal danger as a
result.

But I do have a new character in a book I’m outlining—this
one set during the American Civil War—who I think will become another favorite.
Where Valens always tries to act rightly and inevitably puts himself in danger,
Nathaniel Fox ends up in danger and forced to act heroically despite doing
everything he can to avoid both.

Tell us
about your writing process (outline or a die-hard ‘pantser’).

Oh, I’ve learned that I need a detailed outline before I
really commit to writing anything more than a few thousand words. Knowing that
I’ve got the whole arc of a real story in hand is vital. A few years ago, I got
cocky and figured that I could write a contemporary thriller I’d been
contemplating without bothering with an outline. After all, I thought, with six
published books to my name, I was a pro, a literary veteran. And since I had a
fantastic opening and a spectacular climax already firmly in mind, all I had to
do was write my way through the middle. Well, I hit the creative wall about 10,000
words in…and I still haven’t yet figured out how the two pieces of that story
connect!

Now, before I start writing, I make sure that I’ve got a
fairly clear understanding of the main characters—everything from their
appearance to brief bios to their motivations and quirks. And then I lay out
the book by chapter and scene, sketching in each plot point and location in
enough detail so that I can see how all the pieces fit together. That doesn’t
mean that things won’t change as I fight my way through the book. Scenes and
chapters often shift and some pieces of action or narrative that seemed
important vanish, while newer scenes I hadn’t first contemplated take shape. I think
I’ve hit a new record, though, with the outline for THE STANDARD-BEARER. It’s
close to 40,000 words, complete with whole sections of dialogue, description,
and action…not bad for a book that will probably clock out at 110,000 words in
total!

Tell us
about your self-publishing experience (or e-pub experience).

I’ve been looking forward to testing the eBook waters for
a couple of years now. The old publishing model—the one where a relative
handful of people control which stories are printed and which ones are ignored—has
been dying for a long time. The old model was great if you wrote books that fit
the template these gatekeepers thought would sell. But it was terrible if you
were trying to think outside of that rather cramped New York insider box. And,
in the end, the results—rapidly declining sales and profits—tell the whole
story. If something can’t go on, it won’t.

From a writer’s perspective, the ongoing collapse of the
old publishing world means an end to those comforting advance checks—and those
usefully dire punishments always threatened for failing to meet a deadline. On
the other hand, I think the new eBook world offers writers some real advantages
of its own, including creative freedom and the chance for their stories to
build audiences over time. I’ve always hated the fact that most new books only
get six to eight weeks on the shelves of most bookstores. That really isn’t
enough time for anyone to buy, read, and recommend most books. And that, in
turn, pushed publishers to emphasize copycat stories that followed existing
trends…not original works that would make trends. Also, research and anecdotal
evidence show that readers buy more eBooks and read them faster than they do
print versions. And finally, from a crassly commercial but realistic viewpoint,
authors selling their eBooks at $2.99 make more per book than they would from a
$9.99 paperback and close to what they would from hardbacks priced at $25.00
and more. (In the end, I suspect that the surviving publishers will find
themselves buying the rights to print books that sold well as eBooks, rather
than the other way around.)

Fortunately, my agent, Robert Gottlieb, the head of
Trident Media Group, is a shrewd and creative guy in his own right. So Trident
has opened its own eBook Operation. Although Trident isn’t acting a publisher,
Robert and his people are doing their best to make the process of putting out
eBooks as seamless and pain-free as possible—including handling the digital
conversion of manuscripts, ISBN numbers, and putting authors in touch with a
range of cover artists and PR people.

Right now, Larry Bond and I are working through the
process of putting out the five military and counter-terrorist thrillers we
co-wrote—RED PHOENIX, VORTEX, CAULDRON, THE ENEMY WITHIN, and DAY OF WRATH.
It’s been both humbling to read through a million-plus words we wrote 10-20
years ago and exciting to see these novels coming back to life. I just got a
look at the new cover for RED PHOENIX, created by a very talented artist,
Kimberly Killion (www.kimberlykillion.com),
and it’s better than the original cover from Warner Books. With luck and some
hard work, all five will be available for the Kindle, Nook, and other eReaders
in just a few weeks.

And once they’re out the door, I can get back to finishing
THE STANDARD-BEARER and preparing THE TRIBUNE for a simultaneous eBook
rerelease.

What are
your key factors in writing action scenes?

The great difficulty lies in capturing the sheer intensity
and split-second immediacy involved in any fight or chase. To do that you need
to focus tightly, zooming in only on a few of the things your point-of-view
character sees, says, hears, smells, feels, and, most importantly, does. Sentences compress. Secondary
clauses vanish. There’s no room for extended interior monologues, elegant
dialogue, and thorough, lovingly detailed description. If you want to capture
the reader, to bring him fully into that short, sharp, and deadly moment, you
can’t drag things out. The bad news is that most readers have seen a lot of
action scenes in films and television, so they have certain expectations of how
gunfights and hand-to-hand melees go. The good news is that those images they
bring with them also mean you don’t have describe every movement involved in a
sword fight, a gun battle, or a hand-to-hand struggle. Their imaginations work
for you.

Here’s an example from THE TRIBUNE, part of a scene where
Valens is jumped by two assassins in an alley in Antioch:

There were two men close behind me—one much
taller and broader-shouldered than the other. Both wore tattered, sand-colored robes. Loose hoods concealed most of their
faces. Both carried long knives.

Stunned, I stepped back just as the big man
lunged at me. I threw my left arm
up in a desperate bid to knock the dagger away. The blade tore a line of fire across my forearm and then
skidded off the bone.

Panting,
I fell back. I needed time. Time to get my sword out. Time to defend myself.

The
big man flicked my blood from his knife, grinned nastily at me, and waved his
comrade forward.

I
spun round and pulled the stack of cages over, spilling birds and broken wicker
across the alley. The frightened
doves whirled up in a cloud of beating wings.

Caught off-guard, the smaller man backed off
with his hands shielding his face, swearing loudly.

In
Latin.

I
yanked my sword out of its scabbard and thrust it into his stomach in the same
smooth motion. I could feel it
bite deep. He screamed and folded
over the blade. I tore the sword
loose as he went down.

Before I could bring my blade back into
position, the big man attacked again.
He leaped straight over the body of his dying comrade and threw himself
into me.

I
slammed into the stone wall at my back, gasping as the impact knocked the air
out of my lungs. My sword spun
away. His dagger grated along my
ribs, ripping more flesh and muscle.

How much
in-depth research did you do for your historical novel, THE TRIBUNE? Was it
mostly done before, or researched as you wrote along?

I did a lot of the research while outlining the novel.
Part of that was because I love history, so it was pure fun to learn more about
Roman-controlled Syria and Galilee and the tactics, weapons, and equipment of a
Roman auxiliary cavalry regiment. But part of that was out of sheer terror at
the thought of getting something significant wrong. Historical fiction readers
are generally a well-educated and merciless bunch. They seize on errors of fact
or interpretation with great and public glee. But really the process of
research never ended. Even with the most thorough outline and the most in-depth
research, the act of writing each scene inevitably turned up something new I
needed to learn more about—everything from the street layout of
Antioch-on-the-Orontes, to the menu for an elaborate Roman meal, to the methods
used by a competent Greek doctor to suture and treat a wound.

How did
you get involved with co-author Larry Bond?

When I was working as a researcher for a House committee
in Washington, D.C., a Chicago-based game company asked me to write the future
history for a science fiction wargame they were releasing. Creating a fictional
history of the human race up to the year 3025 sounded like a lot of fun, so I
agreed. But when they asked me whether I wanted a 1 percent royalty or a
straight $400 fee, I made my first big publishing error. I took the cash. After
all, I thought, how many copies of a game about giant robots running around
bashing each other can they possibly sell? Well…a lot it turns out. BATTLETECH
went on to spawn a whole series of computer games, novels, and even an animated
series.

Oops.

On the other hand, before I fully realized my blunder, the
game company asked me to give a seminar on the background history I’d written
at that year’s National Wargaming Convention. Well, I gave my talk and then
ended up signing a copy of the game for one of the guys who’d attended. He
invited me to join a gaming group that met at a friend’s house in northern
Virginia every Saturday. Politely, I thanked him and, politely, took the
address he offered. But I didn’t really plan to ever go. I mean, I was a
hotshot Congressional staffer…and no longer a mere gaming geek.

So, naturally, the next Saturday I showed up at the
address I’d been given. It was Larry Bond’s house. He showed me inside. There
was a guy sitting on the floor, chain-smoking, while typing away at a Mac.
“This is Tom Clancy,” Larry told me.

I stared. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER had just come out and
it was already a bestseller.

“Tom and I are writing a book together,” Larry said
matter-of-factly. “We’re calling it RED STORM RISING, and the guys and I are
wargaming out the battles in the book.”

Oh.

Larry and I became good friends and, later, when he and
Clancy finished RED STORM RISING, we decided to write our own military
thriller—one set in a second Korean War. That became RED PHOENIX, and it was
the start of a very productive and very fun ten-year-plus writing partnership.

How did
you acquire the knowledge to write this genre convincingly?

Reading, reading, and more reading. Since I’ve never been
in a battle myself, the closest I can ever come is to read every piece of
military history, every soldier’s memoir, and every piece of classic historical
and military fiction I can get my hands on. One of the most lasting influences
on me has been John Keegan’s THE FACE OF BATTLE. Although it focuses on what
Keegan hopes is a clearer means of describing historical battles and combat,
his emphasis on knowing as much as possible about what those in battle could
really see and hear and understand—and in knowing whether they were tired or
panicked or drunk or wildly excited—seems to apply also to writing convincing
and plausible, and, hopefully, realistic military fiction.

One of my treasured memories is hearing a story told by
one of my younger brothers. When he was a cadet at West Point in the early
1990s, he encountered an older sergeant, a Vietnam veteran, reading RED
PHOENIX. He told my brother, “These guys get it. They know what a firefight can
be like.”

That meant a lot to me.

If you
could have lunch/coffee/tea with anyone, living or deceased, who would it be
and why?

Now that is a tough question. I mean, how do you choose
between Churchill, Wellington, Lincoln, John Paul II, President Reagan, or any
one of hundreds of fascinating personalities? But, if pressed, I’d pick Ulysses
S. Grant. Although underrated by most of his contemporaries and by many
historians, he was probably the most successful general in American history—the
man whose courage, firmness of purpose, insight, and humanity perfectly matched
our country’s need. Without the wartime partnership of Lincoln and Grant, the
Civil War could easily have had a very different and an even more tragic ending.
He was also, from the evidence of his wartime dispatches and his MEMOIRS, a
great writer, capable of producing clear, coherent, and memorable prose under
extreme pressure. And, despite his reputation as a taciturn, silent man, he was
a gifted and funny conversationalist with those he trusted.

Besides, part of my not-so-secret plan in writing one or
more Civil War novels would be the chance to use Grant as a character!

6 comments:

What a great interview. I especially liked learning about your writing process and tips on action scenes. But your choice of Ulysses S. Grant as someone you'd like to meet was especially interesting. My husband's great-great grandfather was one of the Citadel cadets who fired on Fort Sumter and became a general in the war between the states. It was a sad time for the south and for this country. Many people don't realize that sometimes platoons were made up of only family members and they could be wiped out in one battle.I'm glad you're considering writing a novel taking place during that time period.

Fabulous interview! The new book sounds awesome, that period in history has always fascinated me so I look forward to checking it out. Its also very helpful and inspiring to get a glimpse of how other writers organize their plot and thoughts. Thank you so much for sharing with us Patrick!

Just a another great interview and I do have a question. Is your agent publishing your ebooks? Don't you have to do the same amount of marketing if they do it vs. if you did it yourself? What would be the advantage? I've heard that many agents are doing that.

Thanks to all for the compliments! Answering Susie's questions was a lot of fun.

Thorne,Like everything else in publishing, Trident Media's role is in flux. Officially, they're not acting as a publisher, more as a facilitator. The upside of that is they arrange the digital conversions, put authors in touch with talented artists, find freelance editors for those who wish it, and they'll also give advice on marketing. But that does leave the author responsible for most of the PR push. (And many of us aren't that great at self-promotion.) At the moment, I see them as most useful in negotiating rights deals that might pop up if the eBooks are successful. Ultimately, though, I suspect that successful literary agents will find their roles undergoing drastic change. In a world where their role as middlemen between the writer and the prospective publisher is vanishing, they'll need to find new ways to offer their author clients value for their 10-15 percent. How exactly that will shake out is beyond my imagination at the moment!